The Charm Of Ireland Part 6

"Can we get lunch?" I inquired.

"You can," she answered, short and sharp like the snap of a whip, and she stood in the doorway staring at us, without making any sign that we should enter.

"Is it ready?" I ventured further, for the long drive had made us very hungry.

"It is not."

Let me say here that very rarely does any one of Irish blood say "yes"

or "no" in answer to a question. When you ask the man at the station, "Is this the train for So-and-so?" he will invariably answer, "It is,"

or "It is not," as the case may be. When you ask your jarvey if he thinks it will rain to-day, his invariable answer is "It will not." I never heard an Irishman admit unreservedly that it was going to rain.

But before I had time to ask the red-headed girl any further questions, she was hustled aside by a typical little brown Irishwoman, who asked us in and made us welcome. Lunch would be ready in fifteen minutes, she said; meanwhile, if we wished, we could walk to the waterfall.

Of course we _did_ wish, and set eagerly forth past the end of the upper lake, across a bridge, past a great empty hotel which was falling to decay, and up a little stream to the fall. It is really a series of rapids rather than a fall, and only mildly pretty; but growing abundantly in the damp ground along the margin of the stream was what Betty declared to be the true shamrock--a very beautiful trefoil, evidently a variety of oxalis, and certainly much nearer our ideal of the shamrock than the skimpy plant shown us by the gardener at Clondalkin. We gathered some of it, and then hastened back--for we didn't want to be late for lunch. As we were pa.s.sing the lake, we noticed an extremely dirty and unkempt individual, who looked like a vagabond, sitting on a stone, and as soon as he saw us, he jumped up and fell in beside us.

"Your honour will be goin' to St. Kevin's bed," he began.

"Where is the bed?" I asked.

"In the cliff beyant there, sir," and he pointed across the lake.

"How do we get to it?"

"Sure I'll carry your honour and your lady in me boat."

I looked at the fellow, and at the wide lake, and at the little flat-bottomed skiff moored to a rock near by, and I had my doubts as to the wisdom of entrusting ourselves to the combination. He read the doubt in my face, and broke in with voluble protests.

"Arrah, you must go to the bed, your honour," he cried; "and your honour's lady, too. 'Tis the place where the blessed Saint lived for siven years, and if you sit down in his seat you will niver have the backache, and if you lie down in his bed you will niver have any ache at all, at all, and if you make three wishes they will surely come true."

Betty and I glanced at each other. We were tempted. Then I looked at our would-be guide.

"Why don't you make three wishes yourself?" I asked.

"I have, your honour."

"Did they come true?"

"They did, your honour," he answered instantly. "I asked for a light heart, a quick wit and a ready tongue. Your honour can see that I have all of them."

My heart began to warm to him, for he was the first person we had met in Ireland who talked like this.

"Now just be lookin' at this, your honour," he went on, and led us to the side of the road where stood a cross of stone--the terminal cross, as I afterwards learned, which marked the boundary of the old monastery.

"Do you see them marks? This large one is the mark of a horse's hoof, and this small one of a colt's; and 'twas by a miracle they came there.

In the old time, there was a man who stole a mare and her foal, but who denied it, and who was brought before St. Kevin. The Saint placed the man in front of this cross and told him if he was guilty to be sayin'

it, and if he was not guilty to be sayin' it; and the man said he was not guilty. And as he spoke the words, the shape of the hoofs appeared on the cross, and when the man saw them, he knew it was no use tryin' to deceive the Saint, so he confessed everything. And there the hoof-prints are to this day."

They certainly bore some resemblance to hoof-prints, and I could not but admire the ingenuity of the tale which had been invented to explain them.

"What happened to the thief?" I asked. "Did the Saint let him go?"

"He did not, your honour, for it was the law that he must be hanged. But before he died, he asked the Saint to grant him one favour, and the Saint told him to name it; and the man asked that he be buried in the same graveyard with the Saint himself, and that on his grave a stone be placed with a hole in the middle, so that, if a horse stepped over his grave, he might put out his hand and pull it in. The Saint kept his promise, and in the graveyard yonder you may see the stone."

As, indeed, we did; at least, there is a grave there covered by a stone with a large round hole in the middle.

"And now, your honour," went on our guide, as we came to the door of the inn, "you will be wantin' me to row you over to the Saint's bed, I'm thinkin'."

"What is the fare?" I asked.

"As much over sixpence as you care to give, your honour."

"All right," I said. "We'll be ready presently." And we went in to lunch.

We certainly enjoyed that meal, though I have forgotten its ingredients; but I have not forgotten the clean, pleasant dining-room in which it was served. And then we sallied forth for the visit to St. Kevin's bed.

Our guide was awaiting us, and helped us into his boat and pushed off; and at once began to recount the legends of the lake; how the fairies danced punctually at nine every evening, whenever there was a moon, while at eleven the ghost of the fair Kathleen sat on a stone and sang and combed her hair, and at twelve the wraith of a wicked sorceress struck blind by St. Kevin glided about the lake. I forget what else happened, but it was evident that any one spending a night there would not lack for entertainment. And he told us why no skylark ever sings in the vale of Glendalough.

It seems that when St. Kevin was building his monastery, he had a great number of workmen employed, and the rule was that they should begin the day's labour with the singing of the lark and end it when the lambs lay down to rest. It was summer time, and the larks began to sing about three in the morning, while the lambs refused to retire until nine at night. The workmen thought these hours excessive, and so complained to St. Kevin, and he listened to them, and looked at them, and when he saw their poor jaded faces and tired eyes wanting sleep, his kind heart pitied them, and he promised to see what he could do. So he raised his eyes to heaven and put up a prayer that the lark might never sing in the valley, and that the lamb might lie down before the sun was set; and the prayer was granted, and from that day to this Glendalough has been famous as

"the lake whose gloomy sh.o.r.e Skylark never warbles o'er."

At what hour the lambs now go to rest our boatman did not state, and I did not have time to make any observations for myself; but I commend the question to the attention of antiquarians.

By the time all these tales had been told, we were across the lake and drawing in toward a high cliff on the other side; and suddenly somebody shouted at us, and, as the hills shuttlec.o.c.ked the echo back and forth across the water, we looked up and saw two men clinging to the cliff about forty feet up. As our boat ran in to the sh.o.r.e, they came scrambling down and helped us out upon a narrow strand.

"The seat and the bed are up yonder," said our guide. "Them ones will help your honour up."

I looked at the perpendicular cliff, quite smooth except for a little indentation here and there where one might possibly put one's toe, and my desire to sit in St. Kevin's seat suffered a severe diminution, for I have no head for heights. I said as much and listened sceptically to the fervent a.s.surances of the guides that there was no danger at all, at all, that they had piloted thousands of people up and down the cliff without a single mishap, glory be to G.o.d. I knew they were talking for a tip, and not from any abstract love of truth. But in matters of this sort, Betty is much more impulsive than I--as will appear more than once in the course of this narrative--and she promptly declared that she was going up, for the chance to be granted three wishes was too good to be missed. So up she went, one man pulling in front and the other guiding her toes into those little crevices in the rock; and presently she pa.s.sed from sight, and then her voice floated down to me saying that she was all right.

Of course I had to follow, if I was to escape a lifetime of derision, and after a desperate scramble, I found her sitting on a narrow ledge at the back of a shallow cave in the cliff, with her eyes closed, making her three wishes. Then I sat down and made mine; and then the guides offered to conduct us to St. Kevin's bed, but when I found that the bed was a hole in the cliff into which one had to be poked feet first, and that to get to it one had to walk along a ledge about three inches wide, I interposed a veto so vigorous that it prevailed.

Having got up, it was necessary to get down, and when I looked at the cliff, I understood why St. Kevin had stayed there seven years. The method of descent is simply to sit on the edge and slide over and trust to the man below. Fortunately he was on the job, so we live to tell the tale. As to the efficacy of the seat, I can only say that two of my three wishes came true, which is a good average. I don't know about Betty's, for it breaks the charm to tell!

I asked our boatman afterwards why he didn't pilot his pa.s.sengers up the cliff himself, and so earn the extra sixpence which is the fee for that service; and he told me that he couldn't because that was an hereditary right, controlled by one family, in which it had been handed down for generations. The father trains his sons in the precise method of handling the climbers, so that they become very expert at it, and there is really no great danger. One member of the family is always on the lookout above the cliff, and when any visitor approaches, two members climb down to offer their services. Our boatman added that he wished he belonged to the family, because in good seasons they made a lot of money.

We pushed out into the lake again, and rowed up a little farther to another narrow beach, whence a rude flight of steps led to a shelf of rock many feet above the lake, on which are the ruins of St. Kevin's first little church. There is not much left of it, which is natural enough since it was built nearly a thousand years before America was discovered; but I took the picture of it which is reproduced opposite the next page, and which gives a faint idea of the beauty of the lake.

All during the afternoon, I had been conscious, at intervals, of a dull rumbling among the hills, and as we pushed out from the sh.o.r.e, I heard it again, and asked the boatman if it was thunder, for the clouds had begun to bank up along the horizon, and I remembered that we had twelve miles to ride on a side-car before we reached the station. But he said that it wasn't thunder; there was an artillery camp many miles away among the hills and the rumbling was the echo of the guns. He also a.s.sured me, after a look around, that it wouldn't rain before morning.

The basis of an Irish weather prediction, as I have said before, is not at all a desire to foretell what is coming, but merely the wish to comfort the inquirer; but in this case the prediction happened to come true.

When we got back to the inn, we found a new arrival, a very pleasant woman who had come over in the coach from Dublin. Her husband, I learned, was an inspector employed by the National Education Board, who had come to Glendalough to inspect the schools in the neighbourhood. He had started out to inspect one at once, but when he returned I had a most interesting talk with him concerning education in Ireland, and the problems which it has to face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROAD TO ST. KEVIN'S SEAT]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIRST OF ST. KEVIN'S CHURCHES]

The Irish schools, like everything else Irish, are controlled by a central board which sits at Dublin Castle. There are sixty-six other boards and bureaus and departments sitting there, each dealing with some special branch of Irish affairs, and all of them are costly and complicated. These sixty-seven varieties must cause a pang of envy in the breast of our own Heinz, for that is ten more than he produces! The particular board which controls the schools is called the National Education Board, and, like all the others, it is in no way responsible to the Irish people. In fact, it isn't responsible to anybody. Its members are appointed for life, and it is virtually a self-perpetuating body, for vacancies are usually filled in accordance with the recommendation of a majority of its members. It is absolutely supreme in Irish educational affairs.

The elementary schools in Ireland are known as "National Schools," and each of them is controlled by a local manager, who is always either the priest or the rector of the parish--the priest if the parish is largely Roman Catholic, the rector if it is largely Protestant. If there are enough children, both Catholic and Protestant, to fill two schools, there will be two, and the two creeds will be separated. This is always done, of course, in the cities, and in the north of Ireland there are separate schools for the Presbyterians; but in the country districts this cannot be done, so that, whatever the religious complexion of the school, there will always be a few pupils of the other denomination in it. In the villages where there is a church, as at Clondalkin, the school is usually connected with the church and in that case, if it is Roman Catholic, the teachers will be nuns.